One and Only
by PenguinsWillReignSupreme
Summary: Three people, seven moments, one love : Victoire/Teddy/Molly II
1. Chapter 1

_**One**_

"No, inside."

The woman's voice is firm, heavily accented with a Gallic beauty to every word. Liaisons coming where silence would be beheld by a native, she creates emphasis in a language that she has spent so long trying and failing to imitate. Regardless, it suits her purpose well and in front of her, six bodies rise to their feet draped in duvets and blankets and follow her like lambs to the cottage. There is a rising murmur in their speech, a disgruntled glint in their young eyes when they think she isn't looking.

Above all the hubbub comes a voice. It stands out, soothing and deep against the trill of five sopranos and each of them melts a tiny bit at Teddy Lupin's word, "Cold?"

"A little bit."

Ears prick and breaths hitch and the reply is not in the voice they had expected. It is not the eldest girl, it is not Victoire. It is Molly. Nobody stops what they are doing. That would be rude and it would draw attention to itself. For now, they continue their tired moaning and pretend they have not noticed the boy and the girl that is not supposed to be his.

The shadows move and that is how they know that an arm has reached a shoulder. Against the footsteps is a gentle rubbing noise, the sound of warmth exchanging itself from its willing donor to its grateful recipient. Molly smiles and it tugs on the air like it is rivalling gravity itself. At the front of the group, a head turns away, unnoticed in a way that is unfamiliar to it. After all, if you cannot see something, perhaps it will stop existing.

"Non." It is abrupt and sharp and the shadow of the boy's arm fades away again when they stop. The head at the front of the group comes back into view, her hair shielding everything that is not her mother but still her beauty shines. "No boys, Victoire." The blonde tucks her sheet of frail hair behind her ear and even though each face that stares at her is accustomed to it, there is a distant echo of envious whisperings materialising in each mind.

"But Maman," she says and she descends until the boy's wrist is firmly in her grasp. The brunette he stands in front of shivers but nobody sees. "If you won't let us sleep outside, at least let us all be together."

The sweetness to her voice sings out in a way that reads as convincingly as though she were speaking only truth and with a defeated look, her mother concedes. There's a squeal of contentment, a noise of an immaturity that Victoire has always retained and in single file, they push into her room, squeezing together on the floor, the blonde's head on the boy's shoulder and the redhead with the chill trapped between two cousins who she hears talking but cannot listen to.

They speak of nothing. Together, they are old. They have a century between them and they could tell enough tales to span a millennium: moments, phases, girls and boys and pets that have come and gone but their constants sit in that room. Victoire relies on Ted and Dominique, Fran and Roxanne and Molly sits there in it all, thinking that her life could continue on without every single one of them. Almost, anyway.

Maybe there is something about the testosterone buzzing through Teddy, surrounded by five hormonal teenagers. Maybe it is the face that she has grown so accustomed to over time that brings a degree of comfort to him. Maybe it is because he is the only boy that she knows will never desert her. Or maybe it is because he is Teddy Lupin and if she didn't find him perfect, then she would not be a true Weasley.

He sits opposite her, pulling the occasional face when nobody's looking and when night becomes too deep to ignore, she lies on the floor, sandwiched between him and Fran. One by one, she listens to each of them fall asleep: Victoire's breathing steadying on the bed, Dominique's gentle snores next to her. Roxanne almost rocked the room with her tossing and turning but now she has settled and Fran smacks her lips every five seconds in content reverie. Molly squeezes her eyes shut tightly, too scared to move in case any flailing limb wakes them. She likes the silence of the night; a time of underappreciated beauty, seeming to pass without the limits of a ticking watch counting down to nothing but a never-ending cycle of empty life.

"Molly?" His voice is so hushed that she wonders whether she has accidentally fallen into a dream, that the noises around her are merely fabrications of her subconscious, that not one of these thoughts will be remembered in a minute's time. "Molls, you awake?"

His foot nudges her shin lightly and she squeezes an eye open, pinching her wrist beneath the cover of her blanket. His silhouette is broken, deformed by the rise of the radiator behind him and he looks almost monstrous in the gentle light of the clouded moon rising on the waves below the cliff.

"What?" she says, sounding tired but not feeling it in the slightest. As carefully as though her body were made from glass, she shifts so she is facing him. He has sat up, holding out a single hand to her and she feels her inner romantic rearing its head; images of a chorus of champagne flutes, the unreachable end of rainbows, the colour of perfection that changes hue with every passing second as the future becomes the present, past, breaking out of the boundaries of memory and into oblivion. "Why?"

"We can't talk with this lot here," he says and there is a second where she feels like the most important in his life. He has told her that before now, that he doesn't know where he'd be without her and she cannot deny him anything. "Come on."

She doesn't need his encouragement and when he pulls her to her feet, she wants to remember what it is like to be swept into the air by something greater than reality, greater than anything. She recalls the time that in Victoire's absence, he chose her to sweep off her feet into two arms. She had screamed and he had laughed, bouncing her gently and murmuring, 'You're lighter than you look.' She had slapped him lightly but when he set her down, there had been a dull hope that it might happen again. He is just a friend but sometimes, she is sure she does not imagine something more.

She shivers as they pass from the warmth of a familiar home into the bite of the night. "I'm not surprised," he says and she crosses her arms across her chest, quickly conscious of the delicacy of her nightwear. He fiddles with the blanket on his bare back and drifts it over her too, his arm resting on her naked shoulders, fist curled around the cloth. When they sit down, just out of reach of the light that falls from the lanterns strung along the patio, they huddle together and even though it is the least comfortable she has ever been, there is a second of it that just feels right.

"What did you want to talk about?"

"Me?" he asks it as though it was not his idea to venture from the warmth of Victoire's bedroom to the chill of a July night. "Nothing really." She rolls her eyes and he whacks her softly with his arm. "It's just we never get to speak anymore, do we?"

She cannot deny him that. Since his last day of school, little over a year ago now, she has barely seen the figure that was once a hefty part of a fixed routine. A year has changed him. He does not joke as much, a darkness in his eyes that makes him look grown up, the same shade as the ghost of the past that haunts her parents, aunts and uncles. The remnants of a war won but scarring nonetheless.

"Not really," she says, tightening the closeness between the two of them. "You and Victoire, then?"

"Mm."

"Your conviction is spectacular as ever." He doesn't laugh. He doesn't so much as move his head as if to concede. He sits and waits and thinks in a way that makes her want to take the comment back. "What?" She keeps her voice gentle, her hand resting on his leg, softly drifting against fine hair, cold in the breeze.

"Do you think it's the right thing to do?" She finds it strange that he asks something so blunt, so subjective. "I mean, sometimes I feel like the entire world's been waiting for us to get together since she was a twinkle in Bill's eye."

"Do you like her?"

The question seems silly but there are only a few coming to mind and it is the simplest, the most telling. She watches him through fair eyelashes, mulling over a statement that should have a one word answer that falls off the tongue.

"Of course I like her," he says eventually, "everyone does." He pulls the blanket tighter around them and she becomes almost instantly aware of her hand on his leg, intimate, tender and she removes it softly. Perhaps he notices because he carries on, "We don't have much to talk about."

"Yeah, from what I heard, your tongue's been put to better use," she says and he elbows her this time. She gives a short laugh but he presses a finger to his lips and it jars in her throat. He smiles and the way his eyes light up, the only thing in focus in the obscurity of a morning's dream, makes her heart warm.

"Sometimes I feel my whole life's been planned for me. The wife, the job, the kids, everything," he says and he lets the blanket fall down on one side as he runs a hand back through his hair, thick and dark atop his head. "I reckon they're overcompensating for me not having parents to give me direction."

"They do it because they care," Molly corrects, leaning over him to tug the blanket across him again. Her eyes trail down across his chest to the line of his boxers and she becomes ever conscious of the impropriety of her nightdress, selected for a girls' night that he had a last-minute invite to. She tugs up the neckline and pulls the covers closer to her bare flesh. "They just want you to be happy."

"I know."

"And are you?" She thinks to the look in his eyes, the doubt, the worry lines paved across his forehead and she knows the answer.

"Sometimes," he says. "When I don't have to do what everyone expects me to. When I do what I want to do."

"Like what?" She is searching for something for him to hold onto, something that he will always have and she expects a silence that never comes.

"This."

Her hand is jolted into the air and she cannot recall when it became entwined with his. Perhaps when she was fixing the blanket, or when she let go of his leg or maybe it has been like this all along and she just hasn't noticed. Regardless, her cheeks heat and her breathing shallows and there is a second when she feels like everything around her is wrong.

"Molly."

It disappears at his word and when he tilts her head up for their first kiss, she thinks for a moment that it is the start and the end, the blush of tomorrow and the eradication of yesterday. She does not know what happens first: whether the blanket falls away or the rain begins to fall or she has slipped onto his lap but all she does know is that in that moment, there is nothing she wants more than to stay there. Her fingers slip through his hair, his against the cotton of her nightie, and her knees sink into the damp grass as he pulls her closer against him; there is nobody else that matters in that one minute until reality comes crashing down with the muted taste of raspberry lip gloss on him and she slips away.

"You've got a girlfriend," she says. "I've got a _boyfriend_."

"I know."

It is edged in disappointment but in distant hope too and she gives him one last pointed look before shrugging off the blanket and running down the garden, her feet scratching against the gravelled patio. She buries herself in her blanket – her hair soaked to the roots, damp against her neck – and when he comes up five minutes later, he nudges her with his foot. She doesn't respond and it is only when his breaths turn into snores that she deems it safe to turn around.

He sleeps like a child, his legs curled in and his thumb resting near his mouth. Softly, she teases her fingers through his hair, wet through and curling. There is a stab of regret as she lets him go, a moment of irritation at herself, at him, at Victoire and Ben and everyone else that she feels she has let down in the betrayal of two pairs of familiar lips.

When they wake up in the morning, it is as if nothing has changed. It is better that way, of that she is sure.


	2. Chapter 2

_**Two**_

Her hands shake as she steps down from the train. There is a part of her that wants to stop the crowd behind her from surging forward, that wants to protect her from the idea that now there is no more security, no more expectation. There is only her and her future and there is no going back. She cannot tell her parents to calm down, to stop worrying because there is no more time left. There is only her and her entire life is packed into the trunk by her side, a few clothes and books and photographs; replaceable, breakable, unimportant.

Amongst the chaos that is King's Cross at the end of term, there is always a level of familiarity that rises above the base-level of screams and shouts and the bang of suitcases on concrete. Sometimes it's a cousin, sometimes a friend, sometimes the lady that works in the Apothecary and sometimes it is merely the comfort of her parents. When she hears Teddy's voice roaring above the crowd, she stops. It is not her he is calling. It is not her that is swept off her feet. She sees him, way in the distance, half a foot taller than the group of women he has managed to wangle himself into. He swings Lily into the air and Molly cannot tell if the girl's screams are really so loud or whether she has tuned into it, but all she can hear is the strangled squeal of a child in intense admiration for her favourite person.

"Molly."

The shout comes from her mother, a few feet away from Teddy and Lily, and she hurries over. They have congregated in a group, her aunts and uncles, and there is a moment where she is showered in kisses from lips she does not take the time to identify. The questions speed past her, the answers rolling off her tongue in the way she has been rehearsing.

"Molly." Lily tugs Teddy with her and they stand before her, one six inches smaller, the other six inches taller. She plays the middle man well and bends to hug the slither of life that is her cousin, turning her ear towards her so Lily can tell her the secret she is so desperate to divulge. It is a stage whisper, the little girl's brown eyes glinting up to Teddy who doesn't look like he's enjoying himself in the slightest. Molly looks away. "Will you tell Teddy that he _must_ marry Victoire? Aren't they perfect? Then he could be a real Weasley –" she glances up with a laugh and Molly follows her gaze to where the subject of her pleading stands. His hair flashes a vibrant red, his skin freckled and eyes the brightest blue, the same shimmering shade as hers. Lily laughs but Molly cannot make herself. "Tell him."

The older girl stays silent and is grateful when Ginny comes and takes Lily by the hand. They exchange greetings and Ginny asks Teddy if he is coming over for tea tomorrow and then the Potters are gone.

"Hi," Teddy says as they stand in the middle of a steadily emptying platform and Molly rocks up onto her toes to hug him. Her eyes flutter shut, her ear pressed fleetingly against the curl of his hair to try and block out every noise that does not lend itself to a moment like this, a moment of understanding beyond what anyone else will ever know. When they let go, she stares back up to thick brown hair and clear skin but still his eyes shine that brilliant blue.

"Stop it," she says and he bows his head, obediently scrunching up his face to turn them back to brown. His apology is small, meek and she shakes her head dismissively. "Vic's still doing checks of the train."

"I guessed," he replies. Behind her, she can hear the smacking of lips as Lucy appears fresh from her second year. She tries her best not to turn. Her sister has a way with people, a way with seeing more in one moment than most thirteen-year-olds notice in a month. She may be young but Lucy is not stupid and Molly cannot take the risk that she will see through the pleasantries and into the warped prism of the truth. Her train of thought is broken by a chorus of girlish screams from somewhere behind them and she knows there are only seconds before the moment will be broken.

"I'd best go –"

"How are you?"

Their apologies come simultaneously, eyes not meeting eyes. They have been alone plenty of times since that night but here, now, it comes back like a bullet. The presence of everyone and yet of no-one crash together, distance meaningless, and she can only think of the slip of his hand down her back, the urgency of every movement, every touch. Her cheeks are heating but she does not hide it.

"I'm fine," she eventually finds herself spitting out. He nods and glances around. The slamming of the compartment doors come all at once and the way Victoire moves out of the dissipating steam is like a picture on a postcard. Molly watches her in black and white, elegance itself. If the world were to slow down for anyone, it would be her cousin. She is in school robes past their best, her hair is coming out of her ponytail and her gait is weary and ragged but still she catches the eye.

Molly turns around. Her parents are waiting patiently by the barrier and the last thing she feels before walking away is a gentle brush down the back of her arm. She does not look back. She can't.

She always finds her bedroom small after the holidays but now the walls feel like they're closing ever tighter around her, the ceiling caving in, the floor undulating beneath her. She can hear the thrum of conversation downstairs, the dainty drone of Lucy telling their parents everything they will already know from their own schooldays, embellished with secrets that only her eye would ever notice. For her sister, life is barely beginning.

She shivers, the ghost of Teddy's hand across her arm coming back to haunt her deep into the fall of the evening. The lights in the village brighten, those hanging in the sky glimmering in their blind, self-destructive way. She smiles. There's something eerie about knowing that light-years away they are burning brighter than the human eye will ever know, their existence the plaything of astronomers on Earth and the haunting of children's nightmares. With a flick of her wand, her curtains draw shut and when her bedroom door opens, she turns her wand on the figure standing between the darkness of the hall and the dim light of her bedroom.

"What are you doing here?" she asks, putting her wand away and hurrying to the door, closing it quietly behind him. He has his hands in his pockets and when his hair falls in his face, he shakes his head to clear his vision. She doesn't even come up to his shoulder as she passes him, sinking onto her bed and staring blankly. "Did Mum let you in?"

"Yeah," he says, bending down and sitting himself on the floor in front of her wardrobe. The lamp on her bedside table pulls her shadow across his body; she is not sure how but understanding light and dark has never been her strong point. Lifting a cushion off her bed, she slides to the floor opposite him, her legs stretched out so they lie alongside his. "I'm sorry about Lily. She's got it into her head that it's meant to be or something."

"It's fine," Molly murmurs, picking at the tasselled edges of her shield. She hugs it so tightly to her chest that she can feel each carefully threaded bead making a firm imprint on her flesh and she looks up to him. Maybe looking at him will convince him that she means what she says. "She's only ten. It'd be a dream come true."

"For her, maybe," he says and the voice comes from some hidden cavern in his throat, darkened and bitter. It is a little frightening and Molly nudges his leg softly with her foot. His laugh is high but it is underlined by a foreign heaviness that makes him shake his head and sigh as though he is about to admit to something that will change the way the world turns. "Why do I always have to be the Prince Charming?"

When she doesn't answer, he follows her gaze down to the button he has forgotten to fasten at the bottom of his shirt. His hands, resting an inch or two above it, shift and she glances up with a vibrant flush of pink across her cheeks.

"I don't know," she says but she knows as well as he does. He is everybody's hero. He has stopped bullies and fixed broken hearts. He has made them laugh and stopped them crying and in amongst it all, he has been the guiding light they have all needed. He is the six foot two saviour, the hand to hold when the stars go out and not once have they ever expected him to hate it.

"I don't want to marry her, Molly."

"It's early days."

"I don't want to marry her. I won't ever want to marry her."

His voice sounds almost frantic now and she looks at him properly; not at his lips or his hands or his stomach but at his eyes, focussed up at the light that streams down upon them. Putting the cushion down, she slides across the carpet without even the hint of elegance that someone, anyone else might bring to the movement and when she is close, hovers one hand gently against his cheek. Her palm barely brushes the bristle on his face, her fingers jerk gently in mid-air but it seems to be enough because his eyes shut and his head tilts just a millimetre to the left and she can feel the scratching of stubble, the smoothness of skin, the shake of a boy not yet a man who wants to escape a destiny spelled out for him every day.

When he looks at her, she wants to turn back time. She wants to tell Victoire in that conversation that seems so distant now that to him, she is just another girl. She wants to tell her that she is nothing special, that he has known her since the day she was born and that she is a childhood friend, not sweetheart. Only it is too late; she has already told her that they would be perfect, that their family would be over the moon, that it was probably written in the stars. It is her fault. She gave Victoire false hope because she thought her own dreams were too fanciful and now, the way he stares at her with the illusion down, she knows she will never trust her instinct again.

"You don't have to," she says eventually. "It's your life."

"I want to end it." His voice is so firm that it takes her by surprise. Her hand drops from his face but it only has chance to float in the air for less than a second before he has captured it and pressed it to his lips softly. "I'm never going to love her, Molly."

"You've barely tried."

She speaks in a voice that is almost convincing but she is aware that he knows better. He releases her hand and sits up, narrowing again the space between them. She lets her hand cup his cheek again and her thumb drifts absently against his skin. His eyes close, his breathing deep and his lips parted and she rocks forward onto her knees to hold him as tightly as she can against her.

His hands ease her away just enough for them to be able to see each other. Her face is painted the perfect picture of concern that stretches past the expectations of friendship and his pleads, begs for what he knows they both want but he fears they may never get.

"Teddy," she murmurs but any continuation of the sentence is muffled against his lips. Where their first was marred with urgency, this kiss is shared in a mutual disappointment in the world that commands them. Her hope fades but his grows under the impression given by this moment shared in an ever-darkening bedroom in the dip of a valley. Her touch against him is gentle, a broken mess of want and need, of what should be and what shall be. She pushes him away and he pulls her back and in the end, she gives in.

He lays five kisses down her jawline, whispering against her skin. She speaks but there are no words, only the feel of his hands on her waist and hers around his neck. He touches her like she is spun from silk and beneath her, he feels like gold.

The living room door slams and there are footsteps taking the stairs two at a time but this time, the outside is only a fraction of the reality they are sharing. A light flashes off and on, a voice calls, there is a knock and only when the door flies open is the illusion shattered. Molly smooths out her shirt and Teddy wipes his hand across his lips and neither can look the girl's mother in the eye. She disappears and they sit in silence marked by lost desire.

"You should go."

She does not sound angry or upset. She sounds serious and that is what she wants. She cannot allow her parents to gossip idly about something that will never be. From the corner of her eye, she sees him nod and stand to his feet shakily.

"You only have to say the word," he says, fastening the forgotten button and glancing down to her. She cannot bring herself to look at him. "You say the word and we start our own dream."

He kisses the crown of her head and disappears. His footsteps are light and when he calls goodbye to her parents, they reply brightly, as though nothing has happened.

She locks the door and climbs into bed. She squeezes her eyes tightly shut and when her mother comes in, ten minutes later, and strokes back her hair from her face, she does not stop pretending. She cannot. One dream today has already been crushed. She will hold onto the silence of false reverie for one moment longer. Reality can wait until morning.


	3. Chapter 3

_**Three**_

She lies against him and shudders at the touch of his hand on the curve of her shoulder, soft and well versed in the shape of her body. Outside, dawn has long broken, a steady current of brutal wind the sign that rush hour is just beginning and that this is the moment that illusions teetering on the edge of hope must shatter against the cold truth of the real world. Only in dreams do nights stretch on into days.

He moves to stop her when she kicks off the sheets but the feel of his skin on hers is now a burning mark of daily routine. He murmurs her name and she looks back. Lying tangled in a mess of honey gold linen, he looks like he could be perfect. Sometimes she thinks he is. He is handsome, shining bronze in the crack of sunlight that her window cannot keep out, and he makes her feel like she is the only thing that matters. Perhaps sometimes it is too much, too unreal for it to ever be a solution to a problem that she denies she has but when she is alone – without him or any of those came before him – she feels hollow.

"What's the matter?"

Alistair speaks in a gentle Liverpudlian lilt, slipping his arms around her silken waist from behind and kissing her cheek softly. She shakes her head and turns in his embrace so she can lift her lips to his. It is short, sweet, fuelled by a love that is run on lust and prays he does not feel the emptiness that hides beneath the basest of passions. Her desire is a selfish act of self-preservation, a disguise that she has mastered so proficiently that sometimes she even kids herself that this is the man that could make it all better.

And sometimes she kids herself that there wasn't a disguise to start with.

"I'm fine," she says, brushing his hair out of his eyes, a golden brown that makes him look childish, young. He doesn't seem convinced and she presses another simple, chaste kiss to his lips, ducking out of his arms with practised ease. Her smile hovers only for a moment before fading into the shadows of a face that is tired of pretending, tired of being lost, tired of wondering if there is even anything left to be holding onto. "Are you sure you want to come tonight?"

"Of course," he says, and his gaze falls on her with all the intensity of one who cares too much and knows it. She feels a part of her soaring but she does not know why; she has showcased, flaunted each and every man that has been in her life since she left school in front of her family except for him. Alistair has escaped the invites to family dinners, the parties, the lunchtime catch-ups in The Leaky Cauldron. She didn't think he would be interested but in front of her, he has come to life. He takes her hand and twirls her into his body and when she laughs, she is not sure where it has come from. "You sure you're okay?"

"I'm fine," she repeats and finds each word punctuated by a glee that will not fade. His hand slips through her hair with a practised touch and when he tilts her head up to kiss her once again, she almost believes she wants it. He has a power over her that makes him different to Castor and Flynn and Sam. Her pessimism dies when she is with him, her faith in her feelings dissipates to a distant concern and she believes that maybe, contrary to every concern that has ever crossed her mind, this time it could work.

There are questions to answer and she stands by his side like a toy as he charms them into loving him. He has a way with words, a knack for twisting everything he says into a compliment. Her aunts blush and her cousins laugh and people tell her how it took her long enough to find someone so right for her. She smiles and nods and holds his hand tighter because then maybe it would feel as right to her as it does to everybody else.

Her sister stands on the edge of the garden, an awkward bundle of limbs in the height of her adolescence. But she is observant, lurking on the periphery of everything, noticing it all and discounting nothing. Where Rose and Albus and Lily see only the surface, Lucy knows how people work and above all, she knows how Molly works. The older girl – a woman by law but not by mind – watches her cautiously and when the conversation she is nodding and smiling through lulls, she takes it as a cue to venture towards what might just be the end of something that never really began.

"They're inside," Lucy says without taking her eyes off Lysander Scamander dancing his way across the lawn. Molly cradles the wine glass in her hand and sips tentatively. Alistair is engaged in what seems a deep conversation with Uncle Charlie, potentially oblivious to the fact that she has left his side, and not a soul pays the silent sisters a glance. "Victoire and Teddy, they're inside with Aunt Fleur."

She wants to ask how she knows. She is a tender fourteen, an age when most presume to know more than anyone could ever be capable of without knowing themselves yet but she knows that Lucy is special. There is no bias in her beliefs, no exaggeration because Lucy is her sister and that is only natural. They fight. They argue. They are so alike beneath their claims that everything about them is different and Molly knows that her sister is not throwing assumptions at her. She knows.

"You see too much."

Lucy smiles; her face is younger than her years yet there is something in the brightness of her eyes that makes her seem wiser. She does not take her eyes from the Scamander boy, watching him waltz his mother around the garden to the rhythm of a song that Molly cannot make out above the swell of the conversation, but she shrugs as though there is an ancient weight resting upon her.

"No," she says, her voice soft and lips twisting into a smirk painted in scornful amusement. "Other people don't see enough." It is haunting and Molly wants nothing more than to walk away but she can tell from the way Lucy stands that this is not the end. The elder sister sips at her drink, bitter and warm on her worn lips, and waits for the other to continue. "Be careful, Molly." Her head turns ever so slightly now that the crowd has shifted and the Scamanders are hidden from view. Lucy's eyes do not drift towards her sister, they never do, but the purse of her lips speaks for them. "_'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all_."

Silence falls so abruptly that Molly barely notices the stem of the wine glass cracked in two in her hand. She has followed the gaze of every other and watches the procession from the house, a funeral march punctuated with irrepressible glee. Dominique is a doll on show and she parts the crowd like an angel come to herald the impossible, climbing to meet the parade. Aunt Fleur leads, her hands hidden beneath the tray on which she holds a cake of virginal white, and in her wake the ice-cold beauty of a girl yet to grow up and the lover who completes the story.

The crowd begins to sing but Molly cannot find the words that will make everything okay. There is a breeze by her side, her sister lost in the shadows of another fable, and she lets the shattered glass drift to the ground. He does not look at her. He does not look at anyone except the girl who becomes a woman, the sister-in-law to be.

Molly hears her sister's words, a mocking chorus of their hundredth outing in her head: _other people don't see enough_. She has watched for years the art of her sister, the silence and the steadiness and the ability to see all whilst looking at nothing and now she makes her first move at putting her study into practice.

His hand is in Victoire's but their grip is limp, empty. He smiles at Dominique but it does not reach his eyes and every now and then, his eyes flicker in an awkward blink. His body is set, rigid as the storyboard he has drawn himself into, and when they clap Dominique's wish away, his hands fall back into his pockets, not to Victoire's grasp.

In him, she sees momentary hope and when she feels her hand taken in another, she falls for the first time in twelve months into the distant belief that it is his. Her gaze breaks and she lets Alistair take her in his arms to dance through downtrodden dandelions to the beat of a song she does not recognise but which will never be theirs. She laughs and smiles as she should and when the music draws to its close, Teddy is gone.

Her excuses are easy to make and she leaves Alistair with a promise kissed across his cheek. It is a betrayal, perhaps, of everything she wants, of everything she could perhaps have if all follows the line of the fate she wishes she could dictate, but promises are there to be broken.

She does not search for long. The house is small and Teddy is too intelligent to stay within the confines of a home that they both know inside out. She follows her instinct to the dip of the next cliff face, a valley hidden by two neatly undulating hills. The only sign of any life, of any form of human touch the steadiness of his breathing catching on the howl of the ocean beneath them.

Her shadow beats her to him, cloaking him in a dark grey cloud. The space beside him is rocky, uneven and there is a small puddle of rain too far out of the sun's reach to evaporate. She hesitates for only a moment before sitting as quietly as possible by his side.

They say nothing. They do nothing. Their silence is a marker not of having nothing to say but of not knowing where to start. She has her questions as he will have his and she waits for the silence to shatter in the same way it always has before, into conversation heavy with desire, regret, a build-up to a touch too far.

Her resolve breaks first. She has never dealt well with quiet, with a tension so deep that it shakes her to her core with fear of what it could do. "Where have you been?"

He does not flinch or even show a sign that he has heard. If it were not for the way his breathing has slowed, she would be tempted to repeat herself but instead she waits in the way that they are well accustomed to by now.

"Another one?"

Alistair, the sixth to be flaunted under Teddy's nose, and with a nauseating churn of her stomach, she realises they have not been alone since she took the first - Flynn Cross – to Uncle Bill's birthday meal.

"Jealous?" she asks, her tone as spiteful as she can bring herself to make it but it is meagre, breaking on the wind.

"And?"

The word is his distress call, she knows that. This is the moment for her to make it somewhat right and he turns towards her expectantly. His eyes hover on her knees, bare and lightly tanned from the unforeseen glory of that summer, but she does not reach out for him.

"It's a damn sight harder for me to watch you with my cousin," she says and she knows she is right. Hers have come and gone, proof above all that he is an irreplaceable part of her, but he has stayed Victoire's obedient partner. Where he goes, so does she and there is a surge of anger through her as he sets his jaw firmly.

"That's different."

"How?"

Their voices are louder, his gruff and hers shrill, and he opens his mouth to reply but catches his words before he can. His eyes trail up her body, from the caps of her knees to the belt of her waist to the plunge of her neckline before settling on her neck. She does not notice she has done it but her hand clasps around her necklace and when he meets her eyes, finally, he pleads with gentle understanding.

"If I told you I was marrying Victoire tomorrow, would he make you happy?"

In her head, she merges the two together. Teddy – his hair, his eyes, his entire demeanour dark and secretive but with a touch that makes her skin blaze – with Alistair, a never-ending source of something that could be support, bright and sensitive, there to pick her up but never letting her fall in the first place.

"Maybe," she says because Alistair is all of what she thinks but she is not sure she loves him in the way that everlasting togetherness calls for. She cannot see herself growing old by his side. She cannot see the wedding or the children or the curve of her name against his on a tombstone. "And if I married Alistair, would she make you happy?"

He stares at her, the shadow of evening beginning to colour itself against his pallid skin. She feels as though he is reading her from start to finish, picking at her bit by bit with just one look. She wants to look away. There is guilt in her mind now as she thinks of her cousin with a broken heart when he never gave her his whole one to start with. Molly knows his answer before it comes but still she feels herself overwhelmed by the words, by the gentleness of what he says against the blankness of his gaze. He smiles, just enough to make her want to stop him but she is too vain, too desperate for confirmation to do anything about it. Her hand twists into his, fingers lacing and tightening in the way that they should, a pressured closeness, the wish for two bodies to merge just for a moment into one.

"If you were happy, I'd be content with whatever I could get."

They say nothing. They do nothing. Their gazes are fixed, eyes meeting eyes and striving to understand. She knows this is her moment. She knows this is when she casts everything else into memory but she cannot bring herself to seal the unspoken promise that they share.

"_There_ you are." There is a stomping of heavy boots on the ground and their gazes crumble to the dusty recesses of their past. Lily puts her hands on her hips and grins at them. "It's so pretty."

Molly glances over her shoulder to where her cousin is pointing. A rolling scene of purple, pink, orange, blue, a rainbow living before their eyes, tangible if you have enough determination. She smiles and from the corner of her gaze, she sees Teddy's lips turning upwards too. As their hands fall apart as though they never were, the little redheaded girl holds hers out and tugs them to their feet.

As they walk away, they say nothing, they do nothing. There is no need. The moment is gone and Molly knows that it is her fault.

* * *

><p>AN: "'_Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all" is that very famous quote from that very famous man, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in that very famous poem, 'In Memoriam A.H.H.' As I'm fairly sure I'm not a 201-year-old man, I can safely assure you that this quote does not belong to me._


	4. Chapter 4

_**Four**_

Her breath is soft against the threadbare fabric of her aged sofa, her head pounding with the weight of a hard week's work that is not yet finished. Across her lap spill reams of paper, another quill lost down the back of the chair, her wine nestled protectively against the curve of her stomach. Her life has revolved around her job of late, night after night spent sleeping in the living room rather than the emptiness of her bed. There is nothing worse than feeling the coldness of sheets where someone else should be lying, she is sure of it.

She and Alistair lasted one year, four months and two weeks but as much as she tried to convince herself that it was going somewhere, she always knew that it would draw to its close eventually. Unlike the others, unlike Castor, Sam and Riley and the others whose names are jumbled letters in her head, she cannot fill the void with another face. She has tried but each time has ended with an apology as the hands of another featureless figure slip down her back, down her chest, down her legs. They have whispered words that she never wants to hear again – bitch, tease, whore – and watched them disappear from her life as quickly as they came into it.

Sometimes she considers calling into his office, just to say hello, but it would be a step too far. Rumour has it he is seeing Ellie Cattermole now; she's nothing special but nor is he and she must remember to keep telling herself that when night falls and she cannot bring herself to look at the bed. She has binned the sheets but to this day she does not know why.

At the sound of a phone ringing crudely through the room, she wakes, her head heavy on her shoulders and the way her hair has twisted itself into a small nest above her left ear makes her balance skew just for a second. She fumbles through squinting eyes, the room lit by the streetlamps outside streaming gold beneath the blinds, and when her hand clasps around the telephone, she slumps against the wall as though she has no will left in her.

"Molly Weasley?"

The voice is unfamiliar, a rough local twang against a tiredness she feels at the moment that she can relate to. Dazed, she leans over and flicks the lamp by her knees on, her eyes tightly shut to block out the throb of her mind against her skull.

"Yes?" she says, distant but inquisitive. There is a steady thrum of conversation in the background, the occasional bang or jeer. Music thumps out and she knows from the way the bass line thuds that it is Muggle. "How'd you get my number?"

There are only a select few people privy to the information; she has very little contact with the Muggle world outside of her mother's family and that is how she likes it. Her phone rings twice a week, maybe a third time if it is a special occasion, and she always knows the voice. There is something eerie, something that makes the hairs on her neck stand on end and she realises that her hand is shaking.

"Got a bloke here, only one he had on him."

The displeasure in his voice is more than evident and she straightens up, running her hand back through her hair and opening her eyes. The clock on the opposite wall reads midnight and she pushes herself towards the window. The drop is unfathomable but the shadows of the night time crowds rise and fall nonetheless, their patterns dusted on the ground like smudged charcoal.

"Bloke?" she says and she can tell that at the other end of the line, the man is reaching the end of his tether. The phone crashes to the ground and the footsteps which drift away are heavy. She glances in the mirror and silently Summons her hairbrush from the bedroom, tugging it firmly through her hair.

"Says his name's Teddy." She says nothing for a moment, staring back at her reflection and watching herself pale with a morbid fascination. Her make-up has rubbed off, her eyes are watery and small and her lips stained with the evening's Chianti. "Miss? Listen, either you come and get him or he kips on the streets tonight and looking at the state of him, I doubt he'd last the night without getting himself nicked."

"Where is he?" she says, grabbing her keys off the table and shrugging her coat on over the top of her work robes, praying anyone out at this time of night on a Friday will be too drunk to notice. Although her pen is poised across the notepad sat by the phone, she does not need to note the address. The King's Arms, Knight Street – three streets away from where she stands; he has planned it. "I'll be there in ten."

The phone clatters to the table, missing its base by a good few inches but she does not notice. Grabbing her handbag and slipping her wand back into her pocket, she darts out of the door and towards the pub where she is to collect the man that turns her world topsy-turvy as she stands by and lets him.

Since Dominique's birthday, almost twelve months ago, she has found herself doubting everything she thought she felt for him. It has been three years since the night she found herself in a garden, entwined around a friend who in dreams might have been something more, and she has grown up. She no longer fears her family and their words, the threats that have never been spoken to a soul but that linger in the recesses of every mind nonetheless, the threats she knows by heart because she feels them too. She stays away from him because she does not know how to do anything else but now he has come to her and she stands in the street, staring at an olive green door and wondering if it is the start of everything that they should be.

"You going to stand there all night, love?"

She turns and sees a man, not much older than her, leaning against the wall. His hands are dug deep in his pockets, his head tilted towards her with a small smile. He blows out his last breath of wispy cigarette smoke and pushes himself against the door. There is a blast of noise and as he disappears into the crowd, she follows.

It takes her a moment to get her bearings but behind a row of burly men in leather jackets, she sees the bar and squeezes her way as politely as she can to the meek looking man cleaning glasses behind the pumps. He looks her up and down and before she can give him her name, he points to a corner.

"Oh for Christ's sake," she says and the barman chuckles as she makes her way towards the mess that is Teddy Lupin. His nose is bloodied and his hands bruised; the woman that sits with him is done up like she's thirty years younger and she stares Molly down as though she is his own personal bodyguard.

"Molls!" He tries to stand up but the woman at his side pins him back down with a tattooed arm and a burning glare. He doesn't protest, just throws his head back and grins at her as though he's on top of the world.

"You going to be okay getting him home, sweetheart?" the woman asks, all yellow teeth and cerise lipstick. Molly adjusts her coat and pulls the table out so she can yank him to his feet. He is heavy, his feet dragging as she tries to turn him in her arms and she gives his chest a shove.

"Whatchu do that for?" he slurs and slumps against her once more. She looks to the barmaid who stands to her feet and hands her the blood-soaked tea towel she was holding to his hands. Like a mother to a child, the strange woman runs her hands through his hair and gives Molly the smallest of smiles.

"Take care of him."

She is met with silence and when Molly finally gets them into the open air, she yanks herself away from him like he could infect her. She marches ahead and listens blankly to his drunken pleas and shouts and at one point, she almost just gives up and Disapparates until there is an almighty thump and she cannot help but turn.

There are some things she cannot cope with. She hates it when her dad shouts and when her mother calls her 'babe' or when people laugh at others' misfortune. With those things, she knows they will not last. It is a second, a minute, a mere moment in the fabric of each day but when a man cries, she never forgets.

He tries to scramble to his feet but his legs cannot support him and he sits there, on a cold pavement in the obscurity of a midsummer night and cries as her heart breaks on his behalf. She hurries back, her heels tapping primly on the ground and she slips an arm around his shoulders, steadily raising him to his feet.

"It's just one more street," she murmurs. Her body aches with the weight of him against her and the throb in her head comes back with a vengeful bang at each heaving sob he makes. He is murmuring but she cannot make out the words and when they finally stumble through her door, he does not even make it to the sofa. He drops to the ground and buries his head on his arms and she stands, an ugly silhouette intruding on a moment meant for closed doors.

Neither moves. He sobs and she stands and it is like they have never known each other at all. He tries to form words and she quiets him with a soft shush that comes from her own inability to stand it anymore. Each heave of his shoulders, each ripping cry tears her memories to pieces and she has the weakest resolve, as always. Her arms envelope him and he doesn't move as she brushes her lips across his temple, her hands smoothing his hair away from his eyes.

"Let's get you fixed up," she murmurs, moving away and pulling out her wand. He winces as his nose crunches back into place and with one more flick, the blood is gone. She tilts his head towards her, delicate hand under unshaven chin and smiles softly. "All better."

He kisses the curve of her palm and she absently drifts her thumb down his cheek. His tears fall silently now and she shushes him again, her other hand stroking down his arm. There are a thousand questions but she knows to say anything would be to spoil what is to come. Beneath her hands, running on a desire to learn every contour of his figure, he calms. He leans forward just enough to kiss her cheek and the way he hesitates tells her he is not quite as intoxicated as he has led her to believe.

She leans back into him, shrugging off her coat and letting him trace his lips down her neck, kisses short and sharp and eager. He feeds one hand into her hair and lets the other dance its way to the clasp at the base of her neck. Robes are cumbersome things and together they rise to their feet and break their contact just enough for her to pull them over her head. It is at least a practised art and in a manner of seconds, he has his hands on her bare waist and his lips moulded against hers.

He tastes stale, of whiskey and faded peppermint, but there are sacrifices everyone must make for the sake of desire, of fate. She fumbles with his belt, hands shaking in the anticipation of three years gone, and when she feels it loosen in her grasp, her triumph comes out as a groan against his mouth. He lifts her against him, legs hooking through legs and hands pulling and pushing in every which way for that millimetre of extra closeness. She knows she should feel something more – guilt or triumph or disgust – but it is the downside of ecstasy; it overpowers everything of lesser importance and as they find themselves crashing down onto the bed, there is nothing anyone else could ever say or do to stop them.

Mornings are hard. The sun hangs low and Molly wakes first, her legs trapped between his and her lips dry, sore. Next to her, he is at peace. His eyelashes are long and on the tips are the tears dried by her touch. Her hand brushes his hair back softly but she cannot bring herself to wake him. The night before is darkened by the brutal hands of alcohol now and she would rather he leave without a trace than taint her memory of the night that should have been brought to existence long ago.

She is not sure how long she lies there, trailing her eyes down the line of his body from the point of his nose to the curve of his feet, but by the time a knock raps on the front door, she is sure she has never known anyone more perfect. Withdrawing her leg and wrapping herself in the dressing gown on the floor, she glances in the mirror as she passes towards the door. Her hair curls neatly down her back and her eyes are bright and wide, like a girl enlightened. Gently, she shuts the door on Teddy and kicks their abandoned clothes into the kitchen. The knocking is more frantic now and then her name is called with the naïve frustration of her cousin, her one-time best friend.

"About time," Victoire says, stepping inside without invite and flicking the lights on. "Have I woken you?"

"No," Molly murmurs, scrunching her hair under her hands and throwing a glance to the bedroom door, beyond which lies the foundations of a night she cannot make herself forget. The blonde follows her gaze and her face rises in understanding. "It's fine. What's up?"

"I broke up with him," she says, sitting herself down as Molly opens the curtains. Now the light shines through, she can see the tiredness of her cousin's eyes and the same tracks down her face that she kissed from Teddy's cheeks only hours ago. "We had his huge fight. He reckoned I was cheating on him and we were both so angry and I snapped." Victoire runs her hands over her face and shakes her head as though debating with herself. "I don't know where he is."

"Do you regret it?"

Perhaps it is not a question asked in moments like these but Molly is rarely the first choice candidate in these situations. Nevertheless, Victoire weighs it up for a moment and sighs.

"We'd had a bit to drink." There is another moment's silence. Molly knows it is the moment to offer tea and a hug and a promise that it will all be okay but then she feels Teddy's hands on her thighs, on her neck, in her hair and she cannot make herself a better person, the one she should be. "God, I don't know, Molly. I love him."

She says it with a conviction that stabs the younger girl through the heart. She has never heard the words said before, not from Victoire's mouth, and it is said with such raw belief, such passion that it takes every ounce of Molly's self-restraint to sit there and keep the silence that she so wished to break last night.

"Go home," she finds herself saying eventually and when Victoire looks at her as though she has lost her mind, she forces the words out with a gentleness that eats her up. "He'll come back eventually, and then you can talk it out." She bites her lip and tastes vintage malt and red wine and everything in her aches. "It'll be fine."

She stands and Victoire takes her lead. She goes for a hug but Molly's arms cross tightly across her chest and instead the blonde places a kiss on her cheek and disappears. The door closes of its own accord and Molly stands lost in a place she knows better than anywhere else; the secret of a man, the confidante of his lover.

She would like to wake him with a scream. She would like to shake him, punch him, feel the crack of his nose beneath her fist and tell him that it is only a fraction of what he has made her feel.

But she doesn't. She wakes him with a gentle rock of his arm, drops his clothes on the bed and turns around. When he pulls her hair back to kiss her neck, she flinches and when he asks when he'll see her again, she walks away. When he leaves, he does so quietly and once silence has fallen once again across the flat that was only ever meant for her, she picks up last night's wine glass and hurls it at the floor.

Barefoot, she gathers her work into her hands and walks towards the bedroom. She curls herself into a ball and waits for the sun to die into another day, the sheets beneath her burning with her blood.


	5. Chapter 5

_**Five**_

Her hands tangle in his hair, matted against his forehead with sweat, and she watches as the faintest of smiles ghosts across his lips, stained with last night's lipstick. Outside, the sun streams through the window, the curtains left undrawn and hanging proudly in their ties. He squints as he rolls over to face her and when he traces the edge of her body, down her neck, her arm, the rise and fall of her hip, she lets a small laugh trickle out of her mouth.

It has been nine weeks and six days since they began whatever this might be, the week after he had left her flat a hung-over mess, crawling back to the girlfriend that didn't and doesn't deserve him. The sceptical may call it an affair, a lust-fuelled passion driven by the basest of human desires, but in their minds, this is them, testing the water with a toe, a foot, a gentle paddle before venturing out into the endless rise and fall of an ocean that stretches out into what has until now been a dream.

She stares at him like an old picture that she has rekindled her love for, something new amongst the familiarity. It is in his eyes, she is sure, and even if sometimes she says to herself it is merely a trick of his abilities, she cannot make herself believe it. In two eyes of the darkest brown, she sees a glimmer, a shine of light and hope and love that every touch of their bodies makes brighter. She smiles, her tongue catching between her teeth and he moves his hand gently back up her body, smoothing back her hair.

"Do you have to go?" she says, unable to turn to look at the clock that sits behind her. He props himself up just enough to peer over her bare shoulder before flopping back down on the bed, his hand edging away from her body, resting gently on the tangle of sheets between them. She drifts her fingers carefully across his arm, following the contours of every bone, every vein, every scar. He does not pull himself away but he does not respond either.

Sometimes, she wonders if he really means it, the touches and the kisses and the nights stolen from under his girlfriend's nose. Their lies are so intricately wrapped around them that now she feels like she's trapped inside the most fragile of webs, the slightest movement able to topple everything and everyone unfortunate enough to be caught there too. Victoire, Lucy, Lily and a never-ending list of other names and faces balanced precariously on the finest lines of satin, they will all be brought down with them. She dreads the day and she is sure that he does too, the maze building itself in so tightly that soon there will only by one way out: down.

"When can you next get away?" she asks eventually, still trailing her fingers mindlessly across his hand and he turns his head as she sits up. The sheets are tucked tightly under her arms, hiding a body she is still somewhat embarrassed of him seeing when the sun is up and the prospect of the end nigh. He straightens up too, swinging himself out of the bed and grabbing his underwear off the floor.

"Saturday afternoon," he says as he wanders to the window. She picks her dressing gown off the floor and wraps it tightly across her body, following him and relaxing at his arms wrapping around her. His chest is bare, pale in spite of the searing sun that this year's August has brought and his kiss on the top of her head seals a promise always left unspoken. "I've told her I'm going to the Portree match with Will."

"Will who?"

"Don't know," he says and this time his smile cracks through his lips. "She never asks."

They both laugh. It is not intended to be cruel; Victoire is still dear to both of them, still a figure that they fear, but her naivety, her belief in Teddy's innocence is impossible to ignore. She is twenty-one years old and still she thinks her world impenetrable. She cannot see the threats, the true dangers to the relationship that she does not see falling apart around her. It is almost sad, Molly thinks, to be that age and still see the world in black and white; what is and what isn't with nothing in between; no cross, no colour, no life.

"Lucy knows," Molly says when their laughter dies to nothing. She has been wanting, meaning to tell him for days but it has been impossible. The words have melted on her tongue each time, but now she cannot ignore it anymore. Teddy's face hardens above her and he shakes his head as if to question her. "She said I wouldn't understand. Something about two sets of cutlery being in the rack, the butter on the knife being on the wrong side or something? I don't know, I – well, I froze up."

"You didn't tell her she was wrong?"

When she shakes her head, her hair brushes his arm and he unhooks his hands from her waist, turning towards the door. He pauses once or twice, glancing over his shoulder to where she stands alone, half-dressed and hair tousled but confident, sure.

"What was I going to say?" she asks, her voice calm but her eyes stony. "Have you _met_ my sister, Ted? Lying never works, she sees right through it."

He stares at her as though she is speaking to him in another language, his face just as fixed as hers. She cannot tell if he is weighing up what she has said or merely trying to contain himself but eventually he turns his back and walks away. She releases a breath she had not realised she was holding and when the shower springs into life, finds herself relaxing. Her body sinks back into the comfort of her bed, shaping itself into a ball and she closes her eyes from the sun, brutally bright and unnaturally warm.

When he comes back in, he dresses without saying a word and presses a kiss to her temple. She shifts to face him and he sits gently on the bed beside her. His fingers tickle the side of her face as he cups her cheek and he smiles sheepishly.

"I'm sorry," he says and she shakes her head. They do not have the time to argue, to fight. Their hours together are precious; they cannot waste them with silence. "She won't tell anyone, will she?"

"I doubt it," Molly replies, her voice far more confident than she truly feels. The truth is that Lucy has always been unpredictable. Molly did not make her swear or promise anything, just let her sister leave with her expression of contempt set in stone and hoped, hoped that she would put her feelings above Victoire's. "You really should go."

"I know," he says, teasing his hands into her hair and dipping his head for one last, lingering kiss. They say no more. He stands up and leaves, the echo of the door shutting hanging on the air, and she nestles back into the warmth of her sheets, eyes closed in peaceful oblivion.

She has imagined before that time ought to stop for the woman superior to her in all but wisdom, but as Victoire strides through her living room, Molly is sure that this is the moment when it really, honestly will. Her cousin's smile is broad, teeth straight, hair dyed a soft caramel that gleams in the light of an infidelity she is unaware of. She is as much a living image of blissful ignorance as ever and swings elegantly into the empty armchair – the chair that her boyfriend and her cousin once sat on together in a moment almost free of guilt, as they kissed their way into the twisted love that now is pulling their nest of lies ever tighter, ever harder to unravel.

"You look like James has just walked through the door stark-bollock naked," Victoire says and she is so ridiculously, impossibly jovial that Molly has to gather all of her patience not to throw her out there and then. It is half-past two on Saturday afternoon and there are mere minutes, second even, before Teddy is due to stride in. There are only seconds before their worlds get ripped apart. She knows it will be her choice: her family or her lover and in this moment, she feels there is no real choice. "Ted's gone to the match with some guy from work. Thought I'd pay you a visit."

It has been weeks now since they last saw each other: Molly swept up in the high of a fledgling relationship, the ecstasy still dwarfing the weight of the lies, and Victoire basking in the relief after Teddy had graced her with a forgiveness that all three of them believed she did not deserve. Today, Molly feels the awkwardness of a secret, an unspoken code silently broken, and words cannot fall quite as easily as before, laced in betrayal of the most hideous form.

"You're not busy?" Victoire asks eventually and Molly becomes aware of her hands, damp with sweat and smudging the ink off the top piece of parchment. Letting her quill clatter idly to the ground, she sets her work on the table and wipes her hands down the cushions of the sofa, shaking her head.

"No, of course not," she says and a thousand things fly through her mind. Did Victoire tell Teddy her plans? Maybe he knows, maybe he won't come after all and all her panicking will have been for nothing. "Is everything okay you with you two now, then?"

"Yeah," though Victoire's voice is faint, passionless, "he's working a lot, you know?" She pauses, licking her lips as she is prone to in moments of worry and Molly feels the weight of the guilt dropping heavier on her shoulders. "It's better though. Better than the fights."

Smashed china, splintered doors, blood and bones and hearts ground to nothing more than what keeps them breathing; Molly has heard it all over time, the stories and the tears and the despair. It is the curse of two people who strive to find love in a place that it will never be, but she cannot tell them to give up. If the tables were turned, if she were sat on Victoire's sofa thinking on the man she knows she must love but cannot work out why, she knows she would keep trying, keep going until nothing around her made sense anymore.

"I saw Lucy last week," Victoire says and Molly's head turns perhaps too quickly. "She's a fourth-year now, right?"

"Fifth," Molly corrects as time ticks on. She thinks she hears footsteps but they fade into the distance and the conversation around them picks up, talk of Dominique's job hunt and Louis trying out for Quidditch, whether they saw the article about Aunt Ginny in the paper and when the door flies open, there is a moment when Molly realises she has been so involved in the conversation that all the worries seemed to have died away.

Except now, they have come back with a vengeance and she wonders whether if she just Disapparates, it'll make things any better.

It takes Teddy a moment to realise that they are not alone, and when he rounds the corner of the kitchen and sitting room, he beelines for Molly, his grin wide on his face and words almost out of his mouth until the flash of dark blonde in the corner of his eye moves. Molly cannot choose where to look – the woman who has given so much or the man who will now take it all away – and so she stares at her fingernails, polish chipped and chewed.

"You're meant to be at the match," Victoire says and even in her voice, the confusion is evident. It is almost embarrassing to witness, the way that one and one are not adding up in the naïve brain of one who should know better.

Teddy stumbles on his words and from the silence, Molly can tell that two pairs of eyes are boring into her, waiting on a story that will save them all from a truth that nobody is ready for. She shakes her head and stands, turning her back on both of them and pulling her cardigan tighter around her. There is a chill in the air, unseasonable and vicious and it is shattered by the gentlest whimper that she does not realise has come from her own mouth until she goes to speak and finds the words trapped, the lies a mangled mess of letters smashed to pieces on her tongue.

"You," Victoire says and her body does not move as she flickers her eyes – a softer blue than Molly's under ordinary circumstances but burning now – between the two. "And you?"

Neither replies. Where Molly's head is bowed, Teddy looks defiant and a surge of hope courses through the younger woman, the promise of the end of everything that has held them back tangible now in the solidity of his stature.

"God, I am _thick_," Victoire says, spits. She rises to her feet and in less than five steps finds herself inches from Molly's face. She is taller but only just and there is something less threatening about her now that she has lost the metallic shimmer to her hair, her features softened by the darkness. "Couldn't pin a man of your own down for long enough, hey? Had to dig those filthy claws," she grabs Molly's wrist in hers and squeezes until she can feel the press of the bone against her palm, "into mine?"

Molly doesn't struggle, doesn't resist. She stares at the fine chain of Victoire's necklace, a seventeenth birthday present from Ron and Hermione, and waits for the wash of anger to pass by. It never lasts. Soon the tears will come and she will let Ted wipe them away whilst Molly stands in the background as though she never existed. She knows how the story will go. Victoire will get her Prince Charming, her fairytale ending and Molly shall be the girl who goes unmentioned, the first to hold the prince's heart and the last to let it go.

"Coward," Victoire hisses, her breath wet, warm on Molly's skin and she does not deny it. She has never told herself that she is brave, that she follows in her parents' footsteps but she feels the word grasping her, each letter a new stab to a heart tired of hurt.

She turns her head away from her cousin, her eyes flickering for a moment to Teddy stood helpless on the side-lines. It astounds her that Victoire has not yet called him into the fray but it is only a matter of time. Where Molly would be content to let him sit patiently, letting the weight of the decision sink in as he watches on, she knows her cousin expects more: a moment's notice to choose a side, as though it were as black and white as the dress she wears.

"For Christ's sake, at least deny it."

"What do you want me to say?" Molly eventually manages to stammer, the pain in her wrist now deep-set and aching but still she does not struggle. She knows how to deal with these moods, these moments. She will stand firm and wait for it to pass. "Do you want me to lie?"

The silence is marked by a scowl, two eyes filled with disgust, displeasure, disbelief. There is something in Victoire's stance –the powerful slenderness that Molly contrasts with a meek, almost skeletal body – that makes her chill with anger. Where Victoire is physical, her tongue harsh around the words that Molly thinks make the world beautiful, she is mental, biting, cruel.

"Or do you want me to tell you the truth?"

Her voice is still, calm. It slithers through the air, wrapping itself around their necks, binding them. Her eyes flicker once again over Teddy who has turned his back, his eyes settled on the mirror though his head is tilted towards the conversation.

"Do you want me to tell you that I've been fucking your boyfriend for two and a half months?"

She steps an inch closer to the blonde, their noses mere millimetres from each other now, their eyes moving where their heads can't.

"That whenever you gave him the opportunity, he came running straight to me? Do you want to hear about how we laughed at you every day for being so fucking stupid?"

Victoire's eyes are glazing now, their focus shifting just a little so that she is no longer drilling her gaze into her cousin's. Molly can feel the tiny line of tears brimming around her eyelids and when she blinks, she knows that they are marking her bare cheeks but it doesn't matter. It is not a sign of weakness. It is a mark of passion.

"Or do you want me to tell you that we've spent four years pretending there was nothing because we didn't want to break your heart?" she says, the burning reality of the words scorching her lips as they slide into the open with the bubbling excitement of being voiced for the first time. "Do you want to know how I carried on putting you and everyone else in our perfect little family before me until I just couldn't do it anymore?"

Her stare is set on Victoire but in the corner of her eye she knows Teddy has shifted again, the shuffle of his feet the giveaway. She cannot bring herself to break the gaze, the moment, and reluctantly turns her thoughts back to her cousin.

"Do you want me to tell you that I l–"

"Stop," Victoire says and she lets go of Molly's wrist, stepping backwards until they cannot touch each other anymore. The brunette gazes down at the reddened skin, the pain throbbing now, and she cradles it with her other hand as Victoire blindly fumbles for her bag. Without another look at either, she leaves, the door banging shut with such force that the picture frame in the hall shatters but neither Molly nor Teddy moves.

"We're so stupid," she finds herself saying, sinking down into the sofa and feeling something in her warm when he seats himself next to her. Slowly, his arm slips around her shoulders and his lips kiss gently across her hair. He takes her wrist and his sigh brushes past her ear like a breeze that is not all there.

"Let's fix this up." He is not the world's best with healing charms but the pain eases and the marks lighten a little. She tucks her head closer to his chest and watches the tears she silently cries fall onto the hand that is still wrapped around hers. "Molls?" he murmurs, letting go of his grip on her to tuck her hair away from her face. "What were you about to say to her?"

She pulls back from his body so that she can look at him. He has not cried, not yet, but he is shaken. His skin is pale, his hair limp in the way it always goes after a particularly strenuous day. He looks worn and she presses a gentle kiss to his lips.

"You know," she says.

"Say it." They are three words that their relationship has never vocalised; it has defined them, they both know it, but never have they managed to find the moment where it won't hurt to admit to it. She knows that for him, it is now. If she says them, if she tells him that she loves him, he will turn his back on everything except her and it fills her with a thrill she does not want to own up to feeling. "Please say it. Please."

"I can't."

She searches for a part of her, the tiniest little thought in the very back of her mind that will tell her that it's okay but this is too early. She wants to know for sure; she cannot throw away her family for nothing and perhaps if he goes back to Victoire, nobody will ever find out.

"Why not?"

He lifts his hand and drifts it over her cheek. It takes every ounce of her self-restraint to tilt her head away, her hands wringing together. She stands and shakily walks to the mirror, wiping off the tear tracks with a tissue lying on the dresser. Her hand will not stay still, her hair sticking to the dampness of her cheeks and she gives a low sigh, barely audible.

"I said we didn't want to break her heart."

"Would you rather I broke yours?" She watches him stand up and pulls out her wand, hurrying into the hallway and clearing up the mess of glass that Victoire has left in her wake. She places what is left of the frame gently against the skirting board, gently running a finger down the exposed edge of the picture. Her mother and father smile up at her, Lucy mid-laugh, and she knows that off camera, she has just told a joke that she now cannot recall. "Tell me what to do."

Without looking up, she takes a soft breath and shakes her head. It is not her decision to make and she will not push or pull him in any direction. She cannot make him choose the way she wants him to because in this moment, in the middle of it all, she does not know what that is. Her words are not thought out and she knows as soon as they fall that they are flawed, deeply flawed.

"Do what's right."

Lifting the broken photograph, she walks past him to the kitchen. She wants to feel his arm drifting down her back, a kiss against her cheek, a string of irrelevant words mumbled in an ear that is not really listening but she knows that he is better than that. She listens to the door clicking shut and the footsteps fading and she glances back down at her family, cheerfully oblivious to what the fourteen-year-old girl behind the lens is to become in seven years' time.

Brushing off the last few beads of glass, Molly leaves the picture on the worktop and walks into the living room, her legs dragging and head pounding. She curls up on the sofa, the soft scent of Teddy's aftershave still distantly imprinted on the arm of the chair and watches time pass ever slower.

She knows he made the right decision. She just isn't sure who it was right for.


	6. Chapter 6

_**Six**_

Dragging herself through the bustling crowd outside Waterloo station, Molly feels her heart pounding ever louder with each passing moment. She catches sight of herself in one of the shop windows and tucks a curl of hair back behind her ear, her smile pencilled on in the finest Parisian cerise, a present from a man who she thought she could have loved. Once again, she has been proven wrong and strides with purpose out into a London evening just like any other, the air so thick that it is hard to breathe.

Her sister will be waiting and she slips into the comfort of a black cab, the very ordinary manner of travel giving her the time she needs to think. Time has flown; Lucy has left school, working and living each day so that she too can have her heart and soul crushed to nothing by reality. Molly smiles, chewing nervously on the edge of one false nail, and when the car pulls up outside the music shop that towers over The Leaky Cauldron, she pays the driver a little too much and slides out.

She feels almost elegant, twenty-three years old and grown up. She passes her hand back through her hair, shaking it into place and realises that she is trembling. Around her, the passers-by shoot her occasional looks from under their lashes, the tourists staring curiously at the girl who is looking at a brick wall as though it will consume everything about her. She takes one heavy breath and in three steps has pulled open the doors that only she can see and slipped inside.

The world doesn't stop; the people don't quiet and barely a head turns to the woman who stands in the shadow of the door. In the corner, she sees her sister sipping gingerly at a bottle of Butterbeer and she slides into the seat opposite. They don't hug. They don't kiss. Lucy pushes a second bottle into Molly's hands and in a silence common to them both, they drink.

"You look ill," the younger sister says when enough time elapses for any pleasantries to be redundant. Molly smooths her hair down and crosses her arms across her chest. She has been working non-stop, barely setting foot in the outside world for long enough for the sun to have much effect on her pale complexion. She thought perhaps it would go unnoticed but then again, Lucy is the exception to every rule concerning observation. "I said that job wouldn't be any good for you."

"I'm fine."

"Right." Her tone is short, like the crack of a whip, and Molly takes another long swig from her bottle. Over her sister's head, she is sure she sees Hannah Longbottom watching them out of the corner of her eye. Their connection to the woman is distant but she recognises them, that much is certain, and perhaps the word will get out. "She's going to ask him to marry her next month."

The words fall from her sister's tongue lightly, so lightly that they take a moment to hover in the air around her ear before sinking into her mind like an anchor jamming into the sand. She stops tearing the label off her bottle and her eyes flicker so suddenly towards Lucy that it takes them a second to find their focus. Her throat runs dry, her hands still trembling and she tries to process the words that make no sense.

"February 29th, leap year," her sister continues and for the first time in years, her stare is focused only on Molly. The older girl shakes her head. "They've been together for nearly seven years."

"He doesn't love her."

"You've not been here for two and a half years," Lucy murmurs, her voice tender now, the sister Molly feels she has never truly had showing through in this moment. She feels a shift of guilt in her stomach, the absence of almost thirty months a gaping hole between them. She turned her back on everything and now it is coming back to haunt her. Two and a half years in Moscow, Seattle, Brisbane and a thousand places in between, and she has only succeeded in losing more of herself.

"How do you know?"

"You know our family. Vic told Dominique and she told me. She thought you ought to know."

"Dom did?"

Molly always thought it was amazing how all except the darkest of secrets came out in her family. Where almost everyone had known of Victoire and Teddy's first kiss in a matter of days, there were some things that people knew were too much for the family to bear. Before she left, Molly had waited and waited for the angry letters to arrive, the stern telling offs, the cold shoulders but there had been nothing but a note from Dominique, saying that Victoire had told her and it was to stay between them and them alone.

"Mm," Lucy replies, tilting her bottle between her hands and staring up under heavily made-up eyes at her sister. "You've brought it on yourself."

The scathing honesty of a girl who has never been hurt rips through Molly like she is nothing more than a sheet of parchment, asking to be torn. It is the darkness of a child who never found her voice, now older and unable to find the line between the kind and the cruel. There are moments where she thinks they are alike but now, sitting across a table in the shadows of a room that buzzes around them, she feels herself hoping she shares nothing with this girl who does not understand the workings of a mind running on love.

"You don't know anything about it."

She tries her best to sound confident but there is something in Lucy's smile that suggests it is quite the opposite. It is not a challenge but the younger sister makes it so and as a barmaid swoops past with a tray, Lucy hands her the two bottles. There are no barriers left now, nothing to hide behind, their only weapons their voices.

"You didn't tell him you were leaving. He was worried."

"So he went to you?"

There is disbelief rife in her voice and Lucy looks at her as though she is a child who is struggling to understand. Under her stare, Molly feels no different to how she always has with her sister, like she is missing the obvious, patronised and underestimated. A part of her doesn't want to hear the words that are to come, the little voice in the back of her mind niggling at her to stand up and leave, to go back to Sofia and Brasilia and Nairobi and carry on pretending that everything at home is the same as when she left. But she knows she can't. She has proved her cowardice once. She will not do so again.

"I knew," Lucy says as though it explains everything. "I knew about you two so he asked me."

"And just told you the entire story?"

"Well," her sister says, twirling one of her rings on her fingers and smiling that unnerving smile that lights up her eyes with a brutal brightness. "It took a bit of work but he told me eventually."

Molly wonders for a moment whether their parents ever anticipated their children turning out the way they have, the eldest an adulterer, the youngest a sadist and both as manipulative as each other when the moment strikes. Maybe they don't even know. After her mother had caught her and Teddy, she had lectured her for weeks on rights and wrongs, on what is and what can never be. Molly had convinced her well of her understanding; she'd even believed it herself for a time but there are some things that hearts know how to deal with better than heads. Lying is easier when it comes from the heart.

"He told me about the kiss in the garden," Lucy goes on when she gains no response from her sister. "And that time he came over after you left school. He told me how you flaunted half a dozen guys under his nose and that you didn't even ask why he was crying before you shagged him."

Molly winces at her sister's words, spoken with the venom she relishes bringing out, and shakes her head. She cannot find the energy in her, the will to make her sister stop, and so she listens on as a girl who will one day do more damage with her words than Molly could ever do with a kiss continues her blind assessment.

"You've turned your back on him five times," Lucy says, her voice gentler now that she is coming to her close and Molly searches for the words for her defence. "And still the idiot says he loves you."

"He started it," Molly murmurs and Lucy's laugh is like the crack of breaking bones. The older girl shakes her head. "I did the right thing."

"For everyone but you as per usual," Lucy agrees. She stops fiddling with her ring now and picks up her handbag from the floor. She rifles through it until she finds a mirror and touches up her pale pink lipstick as her sister watches on. "You ran because you were scared."

"Doesn't everyone?"

"Mm," Lucy concedes, slipping the lid of the tube back on and dropping it into the depths of her bag. The clasp snaps shut but she keeps it on her lap, a cushion for her stomach as she leans so far across the table that Molly can smell the expensive shampoo on her hair. "Tell him." Her words are almost silent, lost in the cracks in her lips, and Molly edges so close that her sister's breath falls onto her cheek. "Tell him Victoire's going to propose."

Neither girl moves. They sit with their faces centimetres from each other and listen to the quickening of each other's hearts; Molly from fear, Lucy from anticipation.

"I can't," Molly mutters, moving away first and looking away from the table for the first time. There is a man at the bar – four or five years older than her, perhaps – watching them as though they are a pair of circus performers and even when she gives him a hard glare, he merely smirks and tilts his glass towards her invitingly.

"Do you love him?"

Molly starts and looks back to her sister who is still watching her, eyes wide and eyebrows arching in two perfect lines above them. The words take a second to sink in and she gives a small sigh in which her answer hides, emphasised by the soft nod of her head.

"Yeah," she repeats when Lucy looks none the wiser, "but I can't. I can't tell him."

She has spent two years telling herself that she is not a bad person for falling in love. She has made her excuses to herself a thousand times and even though it never lasts long, sometimes she even believes them. She will not claim that she is over him because every week she finds him in her dreams, in the shadows of her reflection, in the corner of her eye, and it hurts when she sees it is merely a cruel trick of her mind. But she cannot expect him to sacrifice his happiness, if that is what he now has, for a girl he cannot trust, a girl who runs away from him every time he offers her his hand. It is not fair on him and everyone else who has found themselves caught up in the whirlwind of their idiocy.

"Molls." A hand covers hers and she looks up to see her sister sitting next to her now, a genuine gentleness in her touch. "He doesn't love her. Anyone can see it."

These moments are rare, the tenderness of two so ordinarily opposed, and even though she knows she should treasure it, Molly finds herself doubting still her sister's motives. It is not that they never do anything for each other. It is not that they do not love each other. It is that they are different and the same and it scares them both to death. She knows she should see the honesty in Lucy, the desire that she may genuinely have to see her older sister happy, but things cannot be that simple.

"Will you please, for once, put yourself ahead of us?"

It is the biggest demand she has ever been faced with and none but Teddy has ever proposed such a question before. Despite every bone in her body shaking with the fear of it, despite her head screaming no and her stomach spinning itself into knots, she nods. Her heart beats faster and her laugh is nervous, light on the air. Lucy smiles and wrapped up in the moment, they find themselves with their arms wrapped around each other in a manner that neither has felt for years now.

"Love you," Lucy mutters in her ear and when she says it back, Molly feels like everything here, everything from now on, might just be okay.

Her confidence scares her as she knocks firmly on the door of Teddy Lupin's rented house on the outskirts of Brighton. The sea is a fair distance away but the wind's still strong and the salt is heavy on the crisp air. The little terrace is nothing special, the paint on the door old and cracked, the windows old and fragile and the front door leading straight onto the pavement, along which a dozen or more cars sit in perfect alignment. Inside, she can hear the clatter of a pan and his footsteps. Even then, she doesn't want to run.

It is only when the door creaks open, jamming on the carpet that has come loose around the frame, and she sees him that the urge to take her wand and just Disapparate takes over. It is cold, looking like rain and her hand flexes around the thin wand in her pocket. He doesn't look much like the Teddy she left behind but there is no doubting that it is him. His hair is a dirty blond, his eyes grey and build bulkier but it is him; his lips fall in the same thin line, his nose still somewhat prominent and even though they have lost the mystery of their colour, everything she needs to know is in his eyes.

"Hi," she says but it sounds nervous, broken on the wind. He doesn't reply. He scales his gaze up from the point of her shoes to the wave of her hair, hesitating slightly longer than necessary on the quiver of her lips. She runs her hands up and down her arms, covered by the heavy winter coat that mid-February in England requires and he silently turns his back on her, the door still open in his wake. She takes it as a cue to follow and wiping her feet on the mat, she crosses into the house.

He has returned to the kitchen and she stands awkwardly in the living room the door opens onto. Through the dining room door she can see his shadow dancing over the cupboards and she clutches her wand tighter. Her eyes skim across the room; she has only ever been here once or twice before. He has settled in now, it seems, the furniture scratched and sagging, the paintwork lighter in the places he has touched up over the years. On the mantelpiece, a battered carriage clock ticks loudly.

"You didn't say goodbye."

He leans against the door frame between the sitting room and dining room, and she starts at the sight of him. Feeding a tea towel through his hands, he doesn't look at her and she finds herself just as incapable to cast her gaze towards him. She stares at the photo frame to his left, the faces waving down at her: James, Lily and Albus on a beach at least a decade ago, Andromeda smiling somewhat shyly, his parents – an old photograph that she knows he has replicated a dozen times for fear of losing it – with two solemn smiles, and in the centre of it all, Victoire. Her heart punches her ribcage and she swallows loudly to try and hide the frantic beating of worry against her chest.

"How could I?" she says eventually, not taking her eyes off her cousin's smiling face, more beautiful than the skyline of Paris which she stands before. "I'd never have gone."

"You didn't have to," he replies, and out of the corner of his eye she sees him looking up but refuses to break so quickly. The strength she thought she had gained in her absence has now dissipated in his presence and she shakes her head sadly.

"I couldn't stay." She crosses her arms protectively across her waist and watches him out of the corner of her eye. He pulls on a loose string of cotton on the towel in his hand, his sleeves rolled up above his elbow and his teeth tug on his lip as though he is trying to stop himself from talking. "It was an amazing opportunity."

"But you're back?"

"Just for a bit," she says, the tremor in the back of her throat like the prick of a hundred needles. She grabs the fabric of her coat between her fingers and squeezes to try and calm herself. "Two more weeks and then I'm in Ottawa for three months."

He nods as though he understands but she knows he cannot; she barely comprehends it all herself. When the opening had arisen for a promotion, to travel the world as a liaison between the British Ministry and the dozens of others across the globe, she had taken some persuasion to try for it. It was Lucy who had written and told her that this was her chance to get out before everything that had happened with Teddy ate her up completely. She had believed it would work but it has been little over two years since that day and standing in his living room, he still makes her feel like she could be a better person with him by her side.

"Sit down," he says, putting the towel down on a cupboard and seating himself on the sofa. He has pushed himself up against the arm and gingerly, Molly shrugs off her coat and takes the other side, lying her bag down between them as a weak barrier

"V-Victoire's not going to come round, is she?"

"No, she's in France until Tuesday," he says, his fingers circling patterns on the fabric of the settee. "Her grandmother's birthday." She nods softly, her eyes floating to the clock again. Time passes too slowly when there are unsaid things hanging in the air like stars in sunlight. "What are you doing here?"

"I don't know."

Even though he doesn't move a muscle, doesn't show any sign of doubt, she knows he does not believe her. She can keep her secrets, her silence but she knows he will break her down eventually.

"Have you found someone?"

"No." It takes them both by surprise, the speed of her reply, and she shakes her head. "I've tried but no. I get moved about too much."

It is a poor excuse. Heitor had offered to get her a job in a different department in Brazil's Ministry, one where she could stay for as long as she wished. Paul had written from Brisbane every week for three months before she put him out of his misery. Théo had moved to Sofia with her for two months before she could find the courage to tell him that it wasn't going to work. Each time, her leaving was merely a well-timed excuse to tell the man in question that she was never going to become Molly Staines or Molly Gauthier or Molly Fernández. With age, she has become no more mature than she was when it was Alistair she let slip from her grasp.

They sit in silence for a little longer. Where before it was never awkward, now the air between them weighs down with a dark intensity, the same cloudy chill that Molly has always imagined in horror stories of Dementors and their emptiness, and she feels her tongue wrapping around the words before her brain does.

"Victoire's going to propose." His head flicks towards her and she feels his gaze burning ever deeper into the side of her head. She does not look at him as she adds, "To you."

"Where've you heard that?"

She fiddles with her tights, rearranging the way they sit across her knees, and tries her best to pretend she imagined the coldness in his voice. He has never directed anything at her with such ferocity, such anger and she thinks that maybe if she just leaves, he'll pretend nothing happened. Yet, as cowardly as she feels she is, she knows her curiosity is stronger and she tells him of the path of whispers that have led her to this house on this day.

"Why are you telling me?"

"Because you've been with her for seven years," she says and the words are as new to her as they are to him as they fall out of her subconscious and into the chill of the room, "and you've not asked her yourself." She pauses, glancing around the room. "You haven't even moved in together."

"Do you want me to say no?"

"I want you to think about it," she corrects and she turns to look at him properly. She manages a smile and shifts her bag so that it no longer blocks the space between them. His gaze moves downwards and he shakes his head as though trying to wrap his brain around it.

"You know, I really thought I was over this."

"Sorry."

"Don't be," he says after a moment's pause. His tone has softened again and he turns so that he is facing her, his head leant against the back of the sofa as he pulls his legs up onto the seat. Tentatively, she mimics him and he gently covers one of her hands in his. She flinches but does not move it away and she lets him tickle the back of her hand lightly with his circling fingers. "I never thought you'd leave. Even when Vic told me, I thought it was a lie."

"I thought it was best."

"Bet you never kidded yourself you were over it."

"Sometimes," she says, nodding as though it confirms her honesty, although she knows full well that he will be able to tell merely by looking at her whether she is speaking truth or lies. "Sometimes I really thought that it might be The One, you know? The one that'd make it all better. Never was."

"Never will be," he adds in a quiet murmur that trembles in the air. "God, I wish you hadn't come." She laughs. She knows it is not meant as an insult because in that moment, she feels much the same. The confusion makes her head spin, the line between right and wrong an undulating wave in the forefront of her mind. "If I say no, will you stay?"

"I can't." It is one of the hardest things she has ever had to say and she turns his hand in hers so they are holding onto each other tightly. "I've got to go to Canada, if nothing else."

"Just three months?"

"Just three months," she affirms, her nod emphatic and her smile comforting. She lifts her free hand and brushes his hair out of his face. As if it is a cue, he scrunches it up and through her fingers fall gentle waves of dark brown, the eyes that have melted her heart now the colour of coffee. She smiles, trailing a hand down a chiselled cheek and the touch of his skin beneath her makes every worry disappear. He covers it in his own, moving his head so he can kiss her pale palm and she shudders. Freeing her other hand from his grasp, she holds his face tenderly and leaning forward, she kisses him gently on the lips that make her feel complete. It does not last long, the wrap of passion to be kept for a day when they are free from the guilt that always runs through these moments, and when they draw away, Teddy feeds his fingers through her hair.

"Promise?" he murmurs, his breath soft on her cheek and eyes closed in an attempt to retain a moment that will not be paralleled for months to come. She smiles even though he knows he cannot see it and presses a second kiss against his mouth.

"Promise."


	7. Chapter 7

_**Seven**_

_He said yes._

The response lies in the bottom of her desk, shredded into the tiniest of pieces but still she cannot bring herself to throw them away. On occasions when it becomes almost like a dream, she pieces them back together; at three in the morning when she cannot sleep, every other Sunday when there is nobody to distract her from pointless wishes, and of late, every time the countdown to going home swings one day closer.

On top of the torn note from her sister lie three letters. Three job offers: Cairo, Seoul and Madrid. Each awaits reply but every time she tries, she finds her hand cramping, her eyes prickling, her head banging and so the drawer closes once again and the clock continues to tick.

She wishes more than anything that she might go home in four days' time in the knowledge that she has found someone better, someone meant for her and only her, someone she can brag of before his eyes and show him what he has lost with a biting smile. Four days is not enough to fall in love, not when your heart still belongs to a tiny pocket of English beauty, over three thousand miles away.

People tell her she looks ill; tired, pale, broken. She paints on a smile that she used to see so often gracing the lips of her older, more beautiful cousin and shakes away their worries. She is not as convincing, she knows that. They wait a day or two but the sentiment is always reiterated. Nobody ever argues with Victoire but Molly is a wall waiting to be knocked down, piece by piece until it crumbles into dust.

Her bags are packed, her office empty of her family's piercing stares yet she still cannot make it seem real. Everyone around her here knows so little of her life. They tease her for her disinterested looks towards the finest of men: they joke of her Mr Right – tall, dark and handsome –waiting in the gardens of Pemberley and how she will have the perfect life in the perfect cottage amongst the rolling fields of Hertfordshire. Not one of them has ever asked her, unfair though it might be, whether their dreams for her are in fact her reality. She is not sure whether she even minds.

"Say cheese!"

The camera flashes and Molly does not need to see the picture to know that it is a perfect capture of everything she has been for the past two months: a girl in a woman's body, lost in a country where she does not belong and forgotten in the one she calls home. Promises break and people change but the throb in her chest, the aching emptiness on her finger, the wrong three words haunting her mind, they are unexpected.

"Not even a smile?"

"What?"

Molly gives her head the slightest of shakes, a temporary dismissal of every worry she has let herself succumb to, and her lips pull upwards into the largest smile she can muster. She knows it should not be a chore but her cheeks ache with the effort and her eyes shift lifelessly from her desk to the door.

"Better!"

There is a second flash and the woman tucks her camera into its bag. The façade falls. With a flick of her wand, the woman shuts the door and sits primly on the arm of the stiff chair in front of the desk. Molly picks at her nails beneath the desk, flexing her fingers idly and not lifting her eyes from her lap.

"Is he waiting for you? Your guy?"

Valerie is forty, maybe more, and she alone has never pushed the question on her. The rumours have spread from Molly's silence and this time, even if there are only four days until she takes the Portkey home, she finds the urge to set the record straight streaming through her.

"No," she murmurs, suppressing an overpowering urge to laugh at the absurdity of it. In her time, she has watched her share of soap operas, dramas, terrible romance films alongside her grandmother, her aunts, her cousins, and none seem quite as ridiculous as this. "He's not mine."

"Yet?"

"That's up to him."

The answer surprises her and she adds nothing to it, no matter how much Valerie probes and teases and begs. It takes only a few minutes for her to give up and accept defeat, and with a tight hug and a promise that she shall never forget her, Valerie leaves.

The sigh that falls from Molly's lips is gentle, weighed down with confusion. One hand runs back through her hair and she glances to the clock on the wall. It has never worked; she likes it better that way. Regardless, she knows that all the broken clocks in the world won't be able to prevent the inevitable. Time does not stop because two hands say so. No matter what her dreams dictate, she will not escape that easily.

The four days pass as though they were merely minutes and she finds herself one moment in the chill of the Canadian Ministry, the next standing in the garden of her parents' home, clutching two bags that hold her life's belongings. There is no welcoming committee. Her mother waves from the kitchen window but she does not even venture out of the house to welcome home the daughter who cannot stop running away. It is still early morning, the sun dull behind an expanse of grey so grand that she cannot see the end and the grass beneath her feet is thick with last night's rain. With a sigh that does not make it to her lips, she strides across the garden and through the back door.

"Kettle's just boiled. Make yourself a cuppa if you want one," her mother says without taking her eyes off the dishes that are cleaning themselves. With a flick of her wand, Molly sends her bags through the kitchen door and to the top of the spiralling staircase in the hallway, the walls around her closing in with each passing second she spends standing in the stifling silence.

"I'm alright," she finds herself murmuring, although her mouth is dry and yearning for the taste of a real English drink slipping down her throat. There are a thousand things more pressing on her mind, the throb in her heart growing ever stronger as she finds herself only moments closer to filling in the gaping hole that has run her life for so long. "I think I'm going to go to Lucy's, actually."

"Lucy's?" It is almost comical, the disbelief in her mother's voice at the mention of her youngest child. "Why?"

"She's my sister?"

"Don't get funny with me, madam." She has turned around now, the pots draining on the worktop, and there is something darker in her eyes than the happiness a mother reunited with her daughter ought to feel. "You're going to his, aren't you?"

"Whose?" She has always been rather good at playing the innocent but even as she says it, she knows she is fighting a losing battle. She may be her father's girl but her mother still knows her well enough to feel her way through the string of lies that her daughter speaks. "No, I'm going to Lucy's."

"They're happy. Don't ruin it for the sake of one kiss."

"I'm going to Lucy's."

She will not allow the argument to go any further. Her mother should understand more than anyone the value of a relationship founded on love; true love, not the morbid obligation that Teddy and Victoire share. Her parents married because they found in the other the second half of their voice. They did not settle for second best and nor shall she.

Without another word, Molly wrenches open the back door and through the drizzle, hurries back up the garden, just past the enchantments that hold back unwanted guests. Her lips are dry and chapped, her hair thick and sticking against her cheek, and she has never felt more lost but clutching her wand, she twirls on the spot and Disapparates, leaving behind only a line of tiny footprints.

Her sister will be working; it is little after midday, so she stands upon Diagon Alley and waits for the silence that follows Lucy like a shadow. The rain is thinner in London, trapped between clouds and the smog that hangs above the city, and under the shelter of the silver awning of the little café opposite the bank, she patiently sits.

"I didn't expect you until tonight."

The older sister starts, the untouched cup of coffee on the table splattering neatly across the white tablecloth as Lucy stands above her with that infuriatingly smug smirk pulling on her lips. Sliding into the seat opposite and pulling her cloak tighter around her, Lucy skims her eyes across the menu fleetingly, before turning them on her sister. From the roots of her hair to the toe of her shoe poking out from under the table, Molly can feel herself being thoroughly scrutinised, analysed and broken down in Lucy's mind but for the first time in a long while, she does not feel vulnerable.

"When are you going to see him, then?" Lucy says, raising her eyebrows as if in challenge. Molly shrugs. There is little point in denying her desire to see it for herself: the relationship that never should have been, blossoming into something that could last out all their lives. Yet, she has too many questions to ask and not enough belief in them being answered to make her want to see for the first time the unbearable happiness of her nightmares. "The sooner the better."

"Yeah," the older girl murmurs. "You weren't lying, then?"

"Sorry."

"Not your fault." There is a moment where the rain spitting down on the canvas above them is the only sound either can stand to hear, until the chime of a cuckoo clock inside the shop signals half past the hour. Lucy glances to her watch as if wanting affirmation before picking her bag up from the ground and standing up. "I was thinking tomorrow, maybe."

"Okay."

They stand together, Lucy an inch or two taller than her sister who places the money for the drink down on the table and cautiously, as though she might explode at any minute, reaches for a hug. It is brief but at the very least relaxed, and Molly watches from beneath the canopy of the café as the sister who sees all disappears behind the heavy bronze doors of Gringotts. Her head pounds and her stomach groans and with a dejected glance to the empty table, Molly Disapparates once again.

Tomorrow comes and goes three times before anything happens. Each morning, she has sat down to breakfast alone in an empty house and willed herself to show the bravery she has never had. Friday comes and she has failed once again, sitting in her father's battered armchair and watching local Muggle news on her mother's television. Her fingers absently circle around the arm of the chair, twisting and dancing around each other. Her mind is running like an olden day film, silent and dim, everything around her black except for him and that smile and that touch.

She often wonders if in her absence, she has made him into more than he really is. They have, after all, never had much chance to get to know each other. It could yet all fall apart and even though she knows that is a possibility with anyone, with Teddy it would be so much worse. It would be a heart only ever owned by him, yanked out and smashed into empty memories. She shivers.

To quell the thoughts she knows will tear her apart, she turns her mind to a family yet to be pieced together, scattered across the universe in hopes and dreams. She can see Teddy in his work robes spooning food into the wide mouth of a child with Victoire's eyes and his nose. She can see the quiet kisses in front of the fire after the kids have gone to bed and the smile the other never sees, irrepressible but never to be shown. In her dreams, she envisages a love between them stronger than what she has ever seen between them in reality. It makes it easier to bear.

She thinks she imagines the sound of the letterbox rattling on the front door but there is a shadow cast across the windowsill that gives away a visitor she has not invited. Flicking the television off with her wand and running a hand through her hair, shorter now and darker, she slips into the hall and pushes the bolt off the door.

If she is honest, she is not sure who she expected. Perhaps in the back of her mind she knew this was a visit that was inevitable, because she does not show any sign of surprise when her eyes meet Victoire's. Neither girl – woman now, she supposes, although that gives them an air of maturity they do not deserve – says a word as the blonde crosses the threshold and steps into the warmth of the house. There is something comforting about the neutrality of the ground they stand on; strictly speaking, nothing here belongs to either of them. The playing field has never been so even.

"Coffee?" Molly offers, her voice scratching against her throat with the effort it takes not to ask the barrage of questions that are running through her mind. Victoire sits gently on the edge of the settee and nods. The brunette hovers only for a moment by the door before turning her back and slipping into the kitchen.

She has never known her to be so silent; of all her cousins, Victoire has always been the worst at bottling in her feelings. Ordinarily, she speaks a hundred truths in every sentence in the belief that words are there to be spoken, not bitten back for fear of offending. She has always been strong but now, Molly can see the cracks beginning to show through and she cannot help but wonder if she ought to be hopeful.

Her hands shake as she pours the boiling water into two chipped mugs and as she stirs, her heart races. She is not sure if she can bear the lecture, the warnings, the threats that if she is honest with herself, she knows are yet to come. She can wish all she likes. They never come true.

With a deep breath, she shuts the kitchen door and slowly sidles into the living room, placing Victoire's drink in her waiting hands and sipping at her own gently as she sits in the seat the furthest from her cousin.

"Maman told me you were back," the blonde says, cradling the cup in her lap, her face obscured by curls of unravelling steam. Molly takes another sip of her drink and nods. Neither can bring themselves to look at the woman they know they have betrayed. "Did you enjoy it?"

"Yeah," she replies, though she knows she does not sound convincing. A gentle cough clears her throat and she brushes her hair out of her eyes. Outside, the wind has picked up, the blossom from the trees swept into gentle swirls, looping and floating on the air as if they are a part of it. "I nearly didn't come home."

She does not know where the honesty has come from. Close they may have been once, best friends even, in recent years they have fallen apart. Only a few years ago, she knew every corner of her cousin's mind but now, she finds herself struggling to read anything from a face tired beyond its years. Victoire places her cup down on the floor and picks absently at her nails, the dark pink varnish failing to disguise the nibbled edges.

"Why not?"

Each question is measured, heavy and although Molly wants to catch her out, wants to ask her why she cares, she cannot. She will not draw attention to the elephant in the room. She will carry on as though Victoire is still in her stupid, splendid ignorance, Teddy still just a name that she says without feeling.

"There's not much here for me."

It is as though the answer was expected because out of the corner of her eye, Molly knows the blonde is smiling. It is not triumphant. It is not angry. It is kind, understanding; the smile given to someone who is missing the point. She looks away.

"I left him."

The silence falls again and even though every part of her knows she should be burning, she can feel nothing but the coldest chill running down her spine. She knows Victoire is still staring at her but she does not lift her eyes from the steam that unfurls from her mug. She can taste the guilt in the air, sharp and bitter, and her stomach turns uneasily.

"When?"

"Couple of weeks ago."

Molly strives to hear the regret, the sadness but there is merely solemnity and the softness of understanding. The questions burst in her brain, a thousand and one reasons fabricated from only a few of her cousin's words but she cannot make any of them coherent.

"You don't – you don't have five fights a week with your soul mate," Victoire says, her voice now wavering as the words Molly knows she has never spoken pour from her. The guilt only grows, an unsettling bubble floating in her gut, and there is a part of her that wishes her cousin had never said anything at all. "You don't throw china or…or have an affair if you're happy, do you?"

"I'm sorry."

She chokes it out and she can see the words hovering in front of her, a golden gilded torment wrenched from her insides. She can see the coffee in her mug sloshing with the force of her shivers and she places it on the fireplace, trapping her empty hands between her knees to still them.

"It wasn't just him," Victoire corrects quietly and in a moment of weakness, Molly looks up. The blonde's cheeks are flushed with shame and softly, without much thought, the brunette nods as though she understands. Her cousin's eyes flutter shut; trying to calm herself, Molly thinks but the next three words tell her it is the building of the courage she needs to speak them. "Go to him."

Her heart beats frantically against her rib cage, so heavy that Molly thinks for a moment she is going to be sick. Everything in her shakes. Her eyes sting, her throat swells, her breath catches and she rips her gaze away.

"He loves you. You love him. Is it that difficult?"

Molly wants to say no. She wants to grin and laugh and run across the country to him but she cannot. She does not notice she is crying until one hits her bare arm and with a trembling hand, she wipes her cheeks. There is a catch. There has to be a catch. After half a dozen battles, it cannot be so easy.

"You broke your hearts six times for me, maybe more, I don't know." There is a shuffling and Molly turns her head again to see the girl she once looked up to bending down beside her. A small, tanned hand slips over hers and Victoire's rouged lips tilt into a small smile. "It's not been fair on any of us."

"Do you love him?"

"What's the point if he doesn't feel the same way?"

"He might," Molly murmurs but before she can finish, Victoire shakes her head. Her thumb drifts softly over her cousin's hand and the smile does not fade.

"He doesn't." There is confidence in what she says and Molly knows she has reached a point where she cannot deny the inevitable anymore. "I'll get over him. As long as he's happy -" she pauses and shakes her head, "- as long as you're both happy, so am I."

There are another hundred points that she could make but Molly knows that they will not change her cousin's mind. There is an unselfishness to Victoire that she has never had before and she wonders if that is merely the fact that they have grown up or whether Teddy's influence has been stronger than they think. Gently Molly stands up, her cousin with her, and for the first time in what feels like forever, they hug.

"You'll go, then?" Victoire asks as they step away from each other, her eyes glistening with a hope that Molly almost envies her for having. She almost nods but catches herself. There are some things that gestures, movements, offerings are not enough for.

"Tomorrow," she says, only this time, it is a promise.

When her mother asks her why she is awake so early the next morning, she lies. Lucy will cover for her, this time at least, and even though she does not argue, Molly knows her mother does not believe her. After the clock strikes eleven and her parents leave for their weekly visit to George and Angelina's, Molly glances one last time in the mirror. Her hair sits in waves around her face, bare but for a lick of mascara and lip balm. She has never made herself out to be more than she is for him, and she will not start now. With a heavy breath, she shuts the front door behind her and Disapparates.

As she stands on the pavement outside his house, she feels a horrid sense of déjà vu overcoming her, the promise that lies shattered around her heart cutting into her. Inside, there is silence and when she knocks, a part of her wonders if this hasn't all been a cruel joke, a test that she has failed. She does not hear his footsteps and when the door opens, it takes him a moment to register that it is her.

"Oh."

It stings but nonetheless there is something inside her that soars at the sound of his voice. She lets her hands drop to her sides and nods.

"Yeah." It is not the most eloquent of replies and there is a part of her that wonders if this is too much too soon. Perhaps her mother's reproach was correct, perhaps this is not the time. Perhaps Victoire was wrong and he does love her, more than the girl in front of him now who if Molly is honest with herself, he barely knows by comparison. "Can I?"

He steps back to allow her into the living room, surprisingly neat save a couple of plates and a row of empty beer bottles on the mantelpiece, and gestures for her to sit down. She takes the nearest side of the sofa, the same place she sat the last time they spoke, and waits for him to join her. Although she is careful not to look at him directly, from the corner of her eye she can see him hesitating and once again, her heart sinks.

"When'd you get back?"

She sees him lean against the cabinet on the back wall but still does not look at him. Time; he needs time and she will give him everything she can. This is the closest she has ever come to having him. The loss will sting even more if she lets him go now.

"Couple of days ago."

"You didn't write."

"You agreed to marry somebody else." She knows there is bitterness in her voice, a sadness tuned for his ear and the never-ending throb of guilt in her stomach beats on. "Did you think I wasn't going to come back?"

"I couldn't keep waiting."

Sometimes she forgot that time went on in her absence, she knows that, but there is a part of her that screams that three months by comparison is nothing. She has six memories of nothing but her and him to hold onto, and he cherishes the same. Six moments across seven years seems insignificant when phrased so coldly, but in her mind they last forever, a continuous flow of hands and lips and touch and smell and taste.

"I promised."

"That means nothing."

As ever there is no anger, no rage. He never raises his voice and that makes it a hundred times harder to hear. The disappointment, the confusion, the loss that coats every word he speaks makes the shame shift inside her.

"Why did you say yes?" She responds because it is the least either of them deserves but her voice cracks and she looks to the window, her eyes floating across a row of photographs, Victoire still sitting centre stage upon the ledge. The cushion sinks and she knows from the shallowness of his breath that he has taken the seat beside her.

"Because you said no."

She turns her head and for the first time, lets herself look at him. His hair is lighter, face thinner, nose straight and lips narrow. Across his jawline, the mark of a day without shaving and in the corner of his eyes, bluer and rounder than normal, the shimmer of a tear he has not allowed himself to shed.

"You never asked me."

"If I had, would you have said yes?" There is a pause, both knowing that any response will be the wrong one, until Teddy gives a small sniff and adds, "You've messed me around just as much as I have you."

"I know."

"She left me."

"She said."

As the words tumble from her lips, she wonders if it is the right thing to have done. Neither has yet looked the other in the eye but as she says her two words, his eyes fly open, a life to them that their passionless conversation has not yet brought.

"You've seen her?"

"She told me to come." The words have been flying back and forth between them like ripples skimming across a lake and for a moment, it all seems too much. Too much, too soon and they both stop to process everything that has happened, everything it might mean for a future neither has ever had the courage to envisage before. "I've never told you, have I?"

She does not need to elaborate. He understands and with a gentle shake of his head, gives her his answer. She knows as well as he does that the question could quite easily have come from him and she shakes her head too. It has been easier to pretend it is all a figment of overactive imagination, of lust and desire and the burning in their throats as they swallow back the words that could make or break them. They have hidden behind other people's feelings, other people's hearts, for too long.

"Is it worth it?" he says, twisting his fingers awkwardly on his lap. "You're not going to just up and leave again?"

"I'm not going anywhere."

She reaches tentatively to his hands, twitching against his legs and slips one of hers gently over them. It does not even cover them but he knows the sentiment is there and that is all that matters now. There is something liberating about the freedom they can show, the simplest of gestures free from scrutiny. They have been alone before but this, this is different.

He twists his head to look at her and as he frees one of his hands to hold hers with, the other reaches to brush a strand of hair from her cheek, held in place with a tear that has not yet dried. He moves so softly that she wonders if he thinks he may bruise her if he presses any harder, his fingertips tickling her skin, and she lets her eyes close. There is something too good about it, too perfect and when she opens them again, she half expects to have just awoken. She laughs and feels his breath warm beside her lips. Her hand trails down his chest and lets herself lean forwards just enough for them to meet.

He laughs against her and she draws away, her hand still moving against his body. He catches her eye for a second, just enough to show her his smile, before he leans in again. They drop their joined hands so that she can cup his cheek and his slips perfectly against the curve of her waist. There is something about it, gentle and slow, that is somewhat innocent and when they pull away again, they do not let go of each other.

She watches every part of him, every spark of life that runs through him, and even if she were to have a reason to stop smiling, she does not think she could. In his eyes, dark again as is his hair, she can see herself staring up at him as if he is her gravity and she is not sure she can ever look away from him again. His thumb moves against her cheek and she bites her lip shyly. They have been everything now; they have been urgent and secret and passionate and deceitful and now, they have been perfect.

"I love you," he says, each letter tracing itself in the air between them as he speaks. Her lips pull again at the words he has never said and she is sure that she is shining in his grasp. She tilts her head forward for one more kiss, one more assurance that this time, this is really it, and laughs.

"I love you too."

_**Fin**_


End file.
